1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for managing medicines used at a site of medical care and, more particularly, to a technology for managing the retrieval of prescribed medicines.
2. Description of the Related Art
Medicines administered by direct injection into a blood vessel are absorbed and act more promptly than orally administered medicines. At the same, however, mistakes in administration of injection medicines affect the human body more severely so that more caution is required in administration.
The process of administering injection medicines can largely be divided into the following five stages:    (1) a doctor prepares prescription of medicines to be administered to a patient by injection (hereinafter, instruction on injection medicines to be administered will be referred to as “injection prescription”);    (2) a pharmacist or the like prepares multiple injection medicines designated in the injection prescription in a hospital dispensary;    (3) the pharmacist examines whether the injection medicine designated in the injection prescription matches the injection medicine actually prepared;    (4) carry the multiple injection medicines prepared in the dispensary to a hospital ward;    (5) prepare an admixture of the injection medicines and infusion fluids;    (6) the injection medicine prepared in (5) (hereinafter, referred to as prepared injection medicine) is administered to the patient at a dosage time designated in the injection prescription.    [patent document No. 1]    JP 2001-199508    [patent document No. 2]    JP 1996-339410    [patent document No. 3]    JP 1995-220011    [patent document No. 4]    JP 1991-264064    [patent document No. 5]    JP 1988-318674    [patent document No. 6]    JP 1984-77568    [patent document No. 7]    JP 2001-199508    [patent document No. 8]    JP 2002-011072
Hospitals accommodating a large number of inpatients face a great burden of preparing injection medicines administered to the patients. Normally, therefore, Injection medicines are prepared in a dispensary on a day before the scheduled date for administration. However, injection prescriptions once issued are often changed depending on the state of health of patients or test results. In such a case, injection medicines prepared according to the original injection prescription may sometimes be returned without being used. Alternatively, an admixture of injection medicines may have already been prepared and has to be discarded.
In the type of operation as described above, injection medicines that are not used at a site of medical care such as a hospital ward may be kept in stock each time an injection prescription is changed. Conversely, a change of injection prescription may require new injection medicines, forcing a pharmacist or a nurse to go back and forth between a dispensary and a site of medical care for transportation of medicines. It may be possible to provide a stock of medicines at a site of medical care for immediate retrieval. This will necessitates, however, distributed medicine management, which makes stock control complicated. Accordingly, a general operation is that medicines are centrally managed at a dispensary and injection medicines are prepared in advance.
Because a change of injection prescription is likely to invite an error in administering injection medicines, medicine handling personnels are required to exercise utmost care. As described, there is a problem at a conventional site of medical care in that medicine handling personnels are heavily burdened.